← Home

Positive Self-Talk

PROCEDURAL
Personal & Social Development›Self-Regulation & Resilience|Ages 7—9|ID: mt_35-DhMh_Yr

Use positive self-talk to manage difficult situations — replacing unhelpful thoughts like 'I'm stupid' or 'I'll never be able to do this' with encouraging ones like 'This is hard but I can keep trying' or 'I've done hard things before'

Mastery Evidence

  • Give an example of an unhelpful thought and rephrase it as a helpful one
  • Use positive self-talk aloud or in writing when facing a challenge
  • Explain how the words we say to ourselves affect how we feel and perform

Assessment Prompt

“When [child] is struggling with homework and starts saying 'I'm rubbish at this', can they catch that thought and replace it with something more helpful like 'I just need to try a different approach'?”

Curriculum Standards2 alignments

PSPE-ID-LO-P2-11IB PYP Personal, Social and Physical Education (PSPE) Scope and Sequencecodes only
Standard code — full text not included in this dataset.
PSPE-ID-LO-P3-10IB PYP Personal, Social and Physical Education (PSPE) Scope and Sequencecodes only
Standard code — full text not included in this dataset.

Prerequisites4

Show full prerequisite tree
  • Vocabulary: resilience and self hard

    Positive self-talk practice requires knowing the term 'self-talk' and distinguishing it from intrusive negative thoughts

  • Simple Calming Strategies hard

    Positive self-talk builds on basic calming strategies

    • Naming Basic Emotions soft

      Calming strategies benefit from naming the emotion you're trying to manage

    • Words for Big Feelings hard

      Calming strategies (calm, breathe, settle) rely on knowing this vocabulary to name and apply the techniques

  • Emotion Vocabulary soft

    Self-talk benefits from wider emotion vocabulary to name what you're feeling

  • Growth Mindset soft

    Self-talk benefits from growth mindset framing

    • Vocabulary: resilience and self hard

      The growth mindset concept requires understanding the vocabulary pair 'growth mindset' vs 'fixed mindset'

    • Learning from Mistakes hard

      Growth mindset builds on understanding mistakes as learning opportunities

      • Words for Big Feelings soft

        Framing mistakes as learning uses the vocabulary of feelings management and coping with setback

    • Making Sense of Problems soft

      Growth mindset understanding (SEL) is grounded in the concrete experience of persevering through mathematical problems — the abstract principle is made real through mathematics

      • Checking Your Own Work soft

        Checking whether a maths answer makes sense applies the universal self-checking habit to a mathematical context

      • How Many in Total? soft

        Problem sense-making at 5-6 requires cardinality understanding to make sense of 'how many' problems

        • One-to-one counting hard

          Cardinality principle builds on one-to-one correspondence — you must count correctly to know the last number tells 'how many'

      • Listening to Texts Read Aloud soft

        Making sense of word problems requires listening comprehension skills

      • Addition as combining or putting together two soft

        Making sense of addition problems requires understanding addition as combining

        • How Many in Total? hard

          Understanding addition as combining groups requires knowing numbers represent quantities (cardinality)

          • One-to-one counting hard

            Cardinality principle builds on one-to-one correspondence — you must count correctly to know the last number tells 'how many'

      • Persisting When It's Hard soft

        Mathematical perseverance with problems is the domain-specific application of the universal persistence habit

Unlocks1